MSI K9A2 Platinum Review - PAGE 1

MSI sent us an K9A2 Platinum recently; and we put it through the wringer.

The K9A2 Platinum is certainly not short of features. It is based on the relatively new AMD 790FX Northbridge, and a SB600 Southbridge. The combination supports HT 3.0, dual channel DDR2 at up to 1066MHz supporting up to 8GB of memory, dual PCIe 2.0 16x slots, dual PCIe 8x slots, one PCIe 1x slot and two old fashioned PCI slots.

We have not reviewed many AM2 motherboards in the last few months, so I cheated, and included results from other AM2 CPU reviews we have done recently for our benchmark testing. This gives more points of comparison as our CPU and motherboard reviews use mostly the same benchmarks. I should also note that our Phenom 9600 launch article was done with a K9A2 CF, which is very similar to the K9A2 Platinum.

The K9A2 Platinum also has one IDE channel, four SATA2 ports on the SB600, and four more SATA2 ports (two internal, two external) provided by a Promise controller. Eight channel audio, Gigabit Ethernet and FireWire round out the major features - but in case you want to know more, below you can see the specifications from the MSI site:

Isn't it possible to take a grinding wheel to the Noctua mounting bracket to help clear the interfering chip? I already ordered the NH-U12P to go with my K9A2 build and just noticed this article. I'm going to try the fabrication and reply back.

Isn't it possible to take a grinding wheel to the Noctua mounting bracket to help clear the interfering chip? I already ordered the NH-U12P to go with my K9A2 build and just noticed this article. I'm going to try the fabrication and reply back.